United Liberty

As much as we poke fun at Vice President Joe Biden for the crazy stuff he says, you have to hand it to him, he’s at least straightforward with his thoughts. He’ll tell you exactly what he’s thinking, no matter how wrong or foolish he may be.

The latest example came yesterday during a campaign rally in Iowa when Biden told supporters that his boss, President Barack Obama, does want to raise taxes by $1 trillion:

You know the phrase they always use? Obama and Biden want to raise taxes by a trillion dollars. Guess what? Yes we do in one regard. We want to let that trillion dollar tax cut expire so the middle class doesn’t have to bear the burden of all that money going to the super wealthy. That’s not a tax raise, that’s called fairness where I come from.

Here’s the video:

Well, it’s not quite $1 trillion in tax revenue that would come with raising taxes on families making over $250,000 — not merely the “super wealthy.” It’s close, but estimates are between $600 to $850 billion over 10 years. Biden can talk about sequestration cuts, the $1 trillion in spending he referenced, but those aren’t hard cuts, but rather cuts in the anticipated growth of spending. The revenues are also a drop in the bucket when one looks at the bigger picture of spending and budget deficits over the next 10 years. And frankly, $1 trillion in spending cuts is nowhere near enough.

Biden says, “We want to let that trillion dollar tax cut expire so the middle class doesn’t have to bear the burden of all that money going to the super wealthy.” Yeah, but it’s their money. Why shouldn’t they be able to keep it? Like so many on the Left, Biden treats all income earned from individuals as property of the state; they just let them keep what ever portion of it the government arbitrarily feels is “fair.”

And as far as “fairness” goes, the Tax Foundation recently put out a chart showing effective tax rates for all income quintiles. As you can see below, higher-income earners already pay a much, much higher tax rate than the middle class. If this doesn’t put the whole “fairness” thing to rest, then nothing will:

And let’s not forget the impact on small businesses, which is something that President Obama and company want to dismiss or ignore. David Harsanyi notes a recent IRS study showing that the President Obama’s tax hikes on higher-income earners will hit one million small businesses:

[J]udging from this new study by Internal Revenue Service,  allowing Bush-era tax rates for high earners to expire, the centerpiece of President Obama’s tax plan and a big part of his campaign rhetoric, would mean that 1 million companies would be hit with new taxes. According to the IRS, which goes to great lengths to define a small business,  high-income earners make up 24 percent of all small businesses that have employees.

Other studies (and pundits) have grossly underestimated the impact that a tax hike on high earners might take on small business, discounting owners of small C corporations and others. Wealthy earners with small businesses account for 923,000 businesses with employees. There are many more in business for themselves.

“No matter how you slice it and dice it, it’s hard to avoid that this is a tax increase on a significant share of small business owners,” said Raymond Keating, chief economist of the Small Business & Entrepreneurship Council told CNNMoney.

This isn’t a difficult choice, folks. Are President Obama and Democrats in Congress ready to sacrifice economic growth and jobs for some arbitrary notion of “fairness,” which really sounds like it came from some an Occupy Wall Street camp rather than being a serious public policy proposal. That’s not how you create fairness. It’s how you further ruin an already struggling economy.